Monday, October 5, 2015

No STEM Shortage

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times recently reported on the much-talked-about shortage of STEM workers, or workers in fields that predominantly deal with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). He notes that many studies indicate that the shortage of STEM workers is imagined. He also discovered that many of the companies that complain about their inability to find STEM workers are, paradoxically, laying off large numbers of them.

It is difficult to believe that there is a shortage of these workers when there is a substantial amount of slack in the labor market. More than seven years after the start of the Great Recession, the employment-to-population ratio, or employment rate, is still down 2.5 percentage points for prime-age (25 to 54) workers.

Like othersupposedlabor shortages, if there were a real shortage, wages would be expected to grow. This is because employers would compete over a small number of workers, and they would need to raise wages to attract those workers.

It's good to see architecture, health and life and physical sciences beating the non science social sciences.

This corresponds to my experience. There's lots of competition in the STEM fields, and lots of able people entering them.